A fantastic beginning of a trilogy for action-lovers and romantics!! :-D

Captivating story. There were some pretty sad parts...well, come to think of it, the whole book was pretty darn sad! I didn't love the main character (she was slightly annoying to me for some reason) but all the characters were so interesting in their different ways. I like how the author captured the three girls' very different personalities. Jenna was my favourite. I really want to know what happens in the next book.

I found the premise of Wither, all girls dying at 20 and boys at 25, very interesting but did not find enough action in this first book. It started out chillingly with the kidnapping of the girls, the extermination of the rejected girls, and the introduction of Housemaster Vaughn, who shows great promise for evilness. However, every time it starts building to new horrors or revelations the plot starts to wither away (no pun intended). I know that Wither is the first book in the Chemical Garden Trilogy and that time is needed to build the world they live in …perhaps there are bigger revelations in book two. I live in hope, because it is free, and I have already bought the series.

I really liked this book, there are dark themes but it really isn't inapporiate for younger teens because there evenyually going to learn about these themes. it's apart of life

Finally a dystopian story that doesn't have the protaganist acting like a comic book superhero.It is written as a trilogy,so information is doled out as the story progresses.You don't find out the real truths, until the last half of the third book,which is the most disappointing part for me,because the protaganist acts way out of character in my opinion.A really good read.

I really love this book, not only is the cover awesome, but the story line is great and pulls your emotions in many directions. You find yourself changing your mind about the characters you initially judged once you get to know them more.

This book reads like exactly what I think it is - the very flawed but still interesting first novel of an author who has a lot of potential and a lot of work to do. The writing is very good at a sentence-to-sentence level, and the ideas and images are attention-catching. The devil is in the details: the explanations for how the world got into the terrible state it's in are either missing or very poorly thought out, and even chance phrases have the feel of an inspired first draft, not a carefully edited completed work. (The third world war which is mentioned once and afterward barely alluded to reduced every continent except North America to "uninhabitable islands so small they can't be seen from space.") It's not just that the scientific explanations for how things happen are often problematically lacking or really dreadful (how on earth was this destruction accomplished without extinction-level events like tidal waves or nuclear winters), or that their implications are ignored (after all this, there's a space program? If not, how do they know what can and can't be seen from space? Using what kind of visual technology?), the social explanations are just as bad, which is much more of an intrusion into the reading experience. I'll read the second one when it comes out. I hope that, in that time, DeStafano has matured as a writer and found friends and editors who encourage her to be a lot more rigorous. World-building is a crucial part of any kind of speculative fiction, and when stories or authors fall down on it, it disrupts any possibility of immersion.

An excellent read, this book is a mind jumbling book that makes you think and its got some romance in there too, definitely a good read

Great book! Some more inapropriate stuff, but well written and gripping. Worth reading, for sure!

I thought the book was great, but it pushed the level of appropriatness with some of the content. the book is more suited for highschoolers rather than younger teens